Stage 4
Being from the midwest, everyone on our team knows how to throw down in some technical criteriums, and were excited for the 9 corner course for stage 4. Axeon set a mega tempo at the very beginning of the race (the first several laps were over 28mph). Once they started to slow down around 20 minutes in, attacks started to go up the road. There was a break of 6 riders that had about 12s to the field, and none of us in it. Knowing a motivated break could go I jumped across (which was a hard 4.5 min bridge) pretty much solo.
Our break was very cohesive, as Aevolo had 2 riders, one of which was doing double turns to drive the break and the Lux juniors riding for Landis Cyclery were driving hard to keep clear for all the green jersey sprints. I basically spent the next 60 minutes trying to be as conservative as possible as our gap grew. There were a couple restarts, but they didn’t seem to have much impact on our cohesiveness. Going in to 1.5 laps to go, there were games that started happening in the break, I felt like I was in a good position, until people attacked earlier than I anticipated, keeping me further back in the group. I still made up 2 spots out of the final corner to pick up 3rd, which means I had an awesome sprint, but just wasn’t in the right place. Congrats to Noah Granigan of Floyd’s Pro Cycling for getting it right.
Another great result on top of a crazy week for the team! I’m mostly ecstatic, but also I can’t help but think about how I could have played the finale differently to pull off win…I think they’ll keep the replay up at https://cyclestream.tv/ if you want to see where I messed up.
Strava: 52.4 mi Ride Activity on March 16, 2019 by Jarret O. on Strava
Of course, my bolts for my GoPro mount rattled out at some point in the last two days, so no POV footage, which is mildly devastating.